Over the years, anticipation has built for the start of observations at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in the mountains of the Atacama Desert in Chile. Originally imagined in the mid-1990s as the Dark Matter Telescope, Rubin is designed to study our constantly moving and changing universe in greater detail than ever before. Once every few days for a decade, Rubin will take images of the entire… Source Over the years, anticipation has built for the start of observations at the Vera C. Rubin O...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with RMF, whose blog can be found at baccyflap.com/prs/blog . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? My name's rmf. My legal name's not terribly har...

For those very long-time readers this blog extensively covered prediction markets  from 2006 to 2008. In a prediction market, you have a future event, such as the winner of an election, and a market that pays off one dollar if that event happens and nothing if it doesn't. The price of this market corresponds to a predicted probability that the event will happen.  I worked with David Pennock and Yiling Chen to create an interactive map that colored every state based on how likely it was to ...

At this evening’s Homebrew Website Club , I asked: What was the biggest change in our websites since we started them? This question was inspired in part by Paul saying something to the effect of how we build our websites and, in the process, figure out what we want our websites to be. There are many lenses through which to think about the question – the technology behind a website, the design of a website 1 , the philosophies and goals behind our website, and more. My answer was that a f...

As many regular readers know, we live in the North Wales countryside, which means it can take time to get the latest and greatest when it comes to technology. As a result, we were previously "limited" to FTTC (fibre to the cabinet) which had a max speed of 70Mbps. As a result, we got okay internet speeds: But then I saw the ISP vans in the village, and I asked them what they were doing - "oh, we're upgrading the village to full fibre" she said. I had to have it! As soon as FTTP (fi...

In compilers, static single information form (SSI) is a common extension to static single assignment form (SSA). It was introduced by C. Scott Ananian in 1999 in his MS thesis (PDF) 1 . SSI extends your existing SSA intermediate representation by discovering facts from your existing program and reifying them as path-dependent/flow-sensitive IR nodes. That might sound complicated, but at least the basic idea is pretty natural. I talk a little bit about it in What I talk about when I talk a...

I have long thought of the hash join/merge join duopoly as reflective of the fundamental truth that basically all data-processing related algorithms are based on either hashing or sorting. Yes, we also have nested loop join, but that's sort of just hash join in disguise. Aggregation? Your options are sorting and grouping, or hash bucketing. Deduplication? Same deal. Union? Intersection? Difference? Same thing. And to me at least, this dichotomy feels very orthogonal. The way that you hash a pi...

Artemis updates The bulk of the SLS rocket core stage for the Artemis III mission is seen here arriving at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. I love the scale of the image being so apparent with people and cars around. Image: NASA / Glenn Benson Science communicator Hank Green made this interactive website of photos spread across the timeline of the Artemis II lunar mission and flyby . Among the technological checkpoints passed by Artemis II, the NASA-MIT-developed optical laser comm...

I’m a long time lurker (and occasional poster) to the netbsd-users mailing list, the official mailing list for NetBSD users. Thanks Ruben, that explanation was helpful. Back on the 16th of April , Michael Cheponis expressed interest in having the NetBSD Foundation be involved with Anthropic and their latest LLM bug detection tool: As most know, Claude Mythos (not released to the public) is the model that found a long-standing OpenBSD security bug. Given that 11RC3 is now being teste...

In July 2016, Peter Thiel walked onto the stage at the Republican National Convention and told the crowd three things. First: “I build things.” Second: “I’m proud to be gay.” Third: “I’m proud to be a Republican.” What he did not say was that he had spent years funding a blogger named Curtis Yarvin, who wrote under the name Mencius Moldbug. Yarvin argued that democracy is a mistake and that the United States should be governed by an unelected, unaccountable CEO-like executive....

Catch Flakes On Main May 14, 2026 A small Mechanical Habit today: When using not rocket science rule / merge queue, continue to redundantly run the full test suite on main. Maintain an easily accessible list of recent main failures — these are the flaky tests to eradicate. For an example, see the “Flakes” link on https://devhub.tigerbeetle.com Flaky tests are tests that fail intermittently, once in a thousand runs. This might be due to a genuine bug (assump...

This year Elon Musk has started banging the drum about building AI datacenters in space. As the only person who owns a successful space company and a (moderately) successful AI company, this is a sensible way to boost his profile and net worth. Is it a sensible way to build datacenters? The cooling problem The first comment underneath most discussions of this always goes along these lines: “you obviously can’t build AI datacenters in space, because heat dissipation is really hard in sp...

Last year I said I'd probably never recommend another Bambu Lab printer again . I still use my P1S, but after Bambu Lab started pushing their always-connected cloud solution as the new default: I blocked the printer from the Internet via my OPNsense Firewall I stopped updating the firmware I locked the printer into Developer mode I deleted Bambu Studio and started using OrcaSlicer I had to do that to keep it under my control, instead of Bambu's. Last year I said I'd probabl...

This article was originally drafted in 2024 but I struggled to finish it then. I was stuck wondering if I was just moaning over the past. Recently, Salma and Jo both shared thoughts that gave me the rage and energy to come back to this. Today is the day I finally have the courage to publish. I can’t recall how many times I thought of writing something like this. I thought of riding certain waves inspired by other authors but most times the embarrassment got the best of me. During those w...

tl;dr: Try out telecast.company ; share your complaints/gripes on GitHub . 2005 birthed the iPod Video and YouTube . 20 years later… it's 2025. Compare YouTube against the podcast (iPod broadcast) ecosystem. YouTube pisses off its creators, fuels a clickbait thumbnail arms-race, and fosters addiction (protip: disable recommendations ). Podcasters thrive in an ecosystem of interviews, educational content, and long-form journalism. Okay, this is a bit unfair. Trash podcasts exist. Q...

txtar is a tiny plain-text archive format Russ Cox introduced in 2018 for multi-file test fixtures. The Go Playground, cmd/go's script tests, gopls's marker tests, and rsc.io/rf all reach for it. txtar is a tiny plain-text archive format Russ Cox introduced in 2018 for multi-file test fixtures. The Go Playground, cmd/go's script tests, gopls's marker tests, and rsc.io/rf all reach for it.

Last week I spent a day at a retreat that brought together several people working in software development to talk about the profession’s future with the rise of agentic programming. The event was help under the Chatham House Rule , so I can’t attribute the comments and stories I heard. (If anyone recognizes themselves, and would like attribution, let me know.) Here are a few tidbits that caught my notebook.  ❄                ❄ One group developed a behavioral clon...

I didn’t expect DwarfStar 4 (https://github.com/antirez/ds4) to become so popular so fast. It is clear that there was a need for single-model integration focused local AI experience, and that a few things happened together: the release of a quasi-frontier model that is large and fast enough to change the game of local inference, and the fact that it works extremely well with an extremely asymmetric quants recipe of 2/8 bit, so that 96 or 128GB of RAM are enough to run it. And, of course: all t...

I just got an email from Amazon saying they're finally going to respect robots.txt . Here's the verbatim email I got: We are writing to inform you that starting Monday, June 15, 2026, crawl preferences for Amazonbot will be managed solely through the industry-standard directives. This gives you direct, ongoing control over how Amazonbot accesses your site, rather than relying on manual requests. If you do not implement robots.txt directives by that date, Amazonbot will follo...

TAIPEI (May 13, 2026) – Shield AI, the defense-tech company building the world’s best AI pilots and next-generation aircraft, and Thunder Tiger Corp., one of Taiwan’s leading manufacturers of unmanned surface and aerial systems, announced today a memorandum of understanding to integrate Shield AI’s Hivemind autonomy software across Thunder Tiger’s unmanned systems portfolio, beginning with unmanned surface vessels (USVs). As a first milestone, Hivemind will serve as the AI pilot on a...

I remember that in those ancient times when the year number still had two zeroes in the middle, I read an article in a computer magazine, it was either CD-Action, or CHIP, an article about this new idea: a printer that could print object in 3D from plastic! The article said that already prototypes were being build, and maybe one day in the future this novel idea might become popular. The 3D printer in all it's glory Fast forward a few tens of years, buzz through the pandemic, and here I am...

I’ve recently been using iReal Pro on an iPad to practice improvisation. It’s a convenient way to play backing parts for a chord progression. But creating and editing progressions in the app is a frustrating experience. Unfortunately, iReal Pro, like most apps, is a walled garden. Short of filing a ticket and hoping it will one day be prioritized, there isn’t much I can do to improve the situation. One of the themes we talk about at Ink & Switch is “ situated software ”, tools that a...

Just a little over ten years ago , I was notified about a big warehouse of manuals that was going to be discarded in a few days. Bursting with energy, I drove down, discussed things with the owner, and, soliciting and ringing a very loud bell, assembled dozens of people and tens of thousands of dollars over the course of saving this collection from being discarded. Naturally, the next step would simply be to digitize them all. That took longer. As of a short time ago, a collection of 13,000 ma...